READING AND COMPOSITION - India in the Writers Eye

This course explores landscape and memory in South Asia, with a focus on Bengal. Landscapes evoke wonder and nostalgia on the one hand, and exploitation, displacement, and cultural appropriation on the other. How do the communities whose livelihoods and ways of life depend on the soil, the water, or the forest respond to the forces of political, social, and environmental change? How are their voices imagined, written, heard, or read? We will look at landscape in relation to conflicting constructions of the “folk,” the dalit (“oppressed”) and the adibasi (indigenous), the “traditional” and the “modern.”